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In October last year, we saw the third iteration of CodeIT Suisse in Hong Kong. CodeIT Suisse is Credit Suisse Hong Kong's signature campus recruiting event, held annually to showcase to university students what technology means to a top tier bank. The event is open to second and third year students looking to investigate career options that can put their technology based degrees into practice.

The team from Credit Suisse created a new set of challenges for applicants to complete, from coding in JavaScript just for a chance to apply, to creating an application to automatically trade against three different "exchanges". We'll focus on the coding challenge today!

Our developers in Credit Suisse created a series of mock exchanges and market data providers, accessible by RESTful API's that the teams would send GET and POST requests to discover and unfurl the functionality available to them. The challenge ahead – showcase the best use of technology that the team can come up with over the weekend.

Most of Saturday morning and afternoon was spent understanding the functionality in the system and then considering some trading strategies that would allow teams to make money. Then in the evening – chaos! Naturally, as teams began to understand that they were essentially building some form of automated trading platform, some looked to emulating methods used by high-frequency trading applications. The ensuing situation was a massive spike in requests against CodeIT Suisse's own platform – causing our own servers to struggle with the load produced from the competitors. Luckily the platform was cloud hosted and more resources were thrown at the servers.

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Sunday afternoon was the teams' chance to pit their applications against each other and, more importantly, showcase their choice and usage of technology over the weekend. The technology used by all the teams was impressive! We saw teams use Java, NodeJS, Python, and many more. But the team that won in the end built a full front to back stack to allow multiple team members to work concurrently, clustering worker agents for improved throughput, and running multiple strategies, each connected using Redis. Finally, their performance was visualized using a cloud hosted website showing real-time portfolio information.

Another year older, another year wiser and another year of CodeIT Suisse. What will be in store next year and what will our participants come up with? A year is a long time in a technology industry.